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Does population decline worry you?
I mean, it’s super important. The population of all of the places we love is shrinking. In 50 years, 30 years, you’ll have half as many people in places that you love. Society will collapse. We have to solve it. It’s very critical.
Uhhh…what? There are a handful of countries with recent population decline, but most of the world is still growing even if growth rates are slowing. I’ve never seen any credible projections of catastrophic population decline.
Sure, but what if those countries are the only places I love tho?
This is sounding close to replacement theory.
Replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman, and there are about 100 countries under that rate. Yes, their populations are still growing, but much of that is through extension of life expectancy and immigration (which requires a higher birth rate somewhere else, lest that other places start seeing shrinking population).
It’s not an immediate crisis, but it is turning into a problem that should be addressed soon.
Yeah it’s a bit of a hyperbole, but the rate is what’s important. By the time we hit worldwide negative growth rates (which is projected to happen this century), it’s going to be way too late to have a discussion about whether or not that’s a good thing.
A good thing for some, a bad thing for others. Good for the environment, most likely. But we’re going to have to extensively reorganize the workforce.
Experts have generally agreed that any reduction in population size will come far too late to help with the current climate crisis. We’re either going to hit sustainability with our current population or die in the process.
While the climate crisis is a significant part of what ails the environment, it’s far from the only thing. Lowering the human population should mean reduced destruction of surviving animal habitats and populations, for instance. And the greater the genetic diversity in an animal population, the better its chances of adapting to external events like climate change become.
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the paywall click: https://archive.is/8WWq2
Link didn’t work for me but
sucksuch a nice wordingsuck a nice wording
I love to suck nice wordings
Weird, just checked and it still works for me.
I guess the server is crushed. I don’t understand modern webpage development and web servers at all. 25 years ago I hosted 10,000 simultaneous connections on 4 megabit line (part of a t3) and a Pentium 3 server. It was fast.
The link is text with a picture. It should be a couple dozen kilobytes. A 10 year old PC on a home 100mbs Internet service should handle hundreds of simultaneous connections.
The link is likely a few kiliobytes of text, 10 meg of uncompressed 4k jpegs that no one bothered to downscale and 50megs of javascript to track you and serve ads
It works for me now, guess it was just down.
I’m having trouble trusting anyone with no scientific background (i.e. no PhD), no published journal articles, and no ethical committee oversight to proceed with a complex problem such as this one.
Theranos : Evolution
Theranos: Genetic Boogaloo.
As long as you don’t use the word eugenics explicitly apparently you can sell anyone on anything.
No they acknowledge that the technology could be used that way. But there’s a lot of actual medical problems we can catch this way. Imagine you carry the Huntington’s gene. How much would you pay to make sure you don’t pass that down to your kids?
Imagine you carry the Huntington’s gene. How much would you pay to make sure you don’t pass that down to your kids?
Nothing. That’s what health insurance is for. Also practically noone has any issues with preimplantation diagnostics when it comes to things that are clearly genetic diseases, what rubs people the wrong way is a) selecting by bullshit criteria, e.g. sex, eye colour, curliness of hair, whatever, b) making designer babies the default at the expanse of erm wild ones, worst of all, c) the combination.
And ethics aside the arguments should be obvious it’s also a bad idea from the POV of the honest eugenicist: Humanity’s genetic diversity is already low as it is it would be fatal to allow things like fashions to narrow it down even more.
Humanity is already shaping its own selection criteria, we might need to start doing something extra to avoid evolving ourselves into a corner by non-PID means. Random example: C-Sections. No mother or baby should die in childbirth, yet, the selective pressure towards more uncomplicated births getting removed might, over many many many generations, leave us with very few women who would survive a natural birth which doesn’t sound like a good situation for a species to be in, to be reliant on technology to even reproduce. Thus is might become prudent to artificially select for e.g. wide-hip genes.
Yeah, but nobody here is suggesting racial criteria. This article is specifically about screening for health issues. Reading more into it, it seems like they’ve paired big data with genetic screening to lay odds on health problems that aren’t just a single gene going the wrong way.
Edit to add, there’s no such thing as an ethical Eugenicist. The theory was based on racism and sterilizing “undesirables”. This isn’t Eugenics.
This isn’t Eugenics.
There’s a debate about that ongoing, whether the word and basic idea can be divorced from its history with scientific racism. I don’t really have a skin in the game but would like to point out that psychiatry didn’t cease to be called psychiatry when we stopped physically abusing inmates, showing them off to gawkers, whatnot, got rid of phrenology, etc. You can make arguments both for “we must start from a clean slate” as well as “let’s own the bullshit of the past to have something to teach students to not do”.
That’s because phrenoloy and the other theories are under Psychiatry and Psychology. You don’t throw out Astronomy because of Heliocentrism. Eugenics was specifically developed to produce racial outcomes. It’s a theory, not a field of science.
It’s first and foremost a word meaning as much as “good stock”, or, more modern, “good genes”. Nazis didn’t actually use it, at least not prominently, they were all about “racial hygiene” – very different implications.
As to “specifically developed” I’m not so sure I don’t know enough about Galton. What I do know is that he first did e.g. twin studies to figure out the relative importance of nature vs. nurture and stuff. People motivated by hate don’t tend to be that thorough meaning if he had more information he might’ve ended up on the other side of the fence but as said I don’t know nearly enough about his work to actually draw conclusions, ask a literary critic or such.
His base assumption was something called genetic determinism. Which is exactly what it sounds like and exactly as debunked as you would think. He also tried to link body build and head measurements to genetic determinism.
And No. The Nazis absolutely loved Eugenics. The entire Western world did. The Nazis literally made it a required subject in grade school.
Eugenics needs to go die in a fire. There’s no need to resurrect the name or practices when we’re talking about actual genetic science.
It’s still eugenics, you just used more words to describe it.
Eugenics isn’t inherently bad, but humans suck and will make it bad.
No. Eugenics is race theory as much as it’s anything scientific. It was about making sure the “correct” races had children. I don’t know what the name for this is in science but Eugenics isn’t about making kids healthier, it’s about making them whiter.
No that’s literally what it means:
The practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations’ genetic composition
Science that deals with the improvement of inherited qualities of a race or breed and especially of human beings
The practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations’ genetic composition
But this isn’t selective breeding, unless you twist the definition to the point where it means something wholly different. If I understand right, this is just screening embryos for potential health problems.
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Genetic screening has been around for awhile now. The scam here (if there is one) is them claiming this is new. Maybe they have a better screening, but this is not Theranos.
The theory of eugenics is specific to racist ideology. They sterilized minorities so they couldn’t have children because they wanted more white people. That’s why it says “inherited qualities of a race, especially of human beings” it is specifically calling race out as separate from the idea of all humans.
Closest, but the method used by eugenics is specifically selective breeding, and is specifically about races or breeds even when you twist the definition like you did here.
You specifically left out the “a science” part, which is also part of the “kids’” definition for eugenics in your source.
eugenics noun eu·gen·ics yu̇-ˈjen-iks : a science that deals with the improvement of inherited qualities of a race or breed and especially of human beings
Removing the “a” from the beginning completely changes the meaning of the word, which is why you did it.
Shame.
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If this is indeed like GATTACA selecting specific embryos after fertilization is not really selective breeding. Selective breeding is picking the parents. This is picking the children. You could do both but it didn’t seem like that is what was happening. I could still see this likely leading to problems genetically not dissimilar to problems with inbreeding. Genetic diversity requires the randomness of life to be useful long term.
You specifically left out the “a science” part, which is also part of the “kids’” definition for eugenics.
eugenics noun eu·gen·ics yu̇-ˈjen-iks : a science that deals with the improvement of inherited qualities of a race or breed and especially of human beings
Removing the “a” from the beginning completely changes the meaning of the word, which is why you did it.
Shame.
I’m not native speaker so please excuse my stupid question. How does the “a” change the meaning? My language doesn’t even have articles so I have troubles with using them or understanding such nuances.
Did you miss where they do that by sterilization? And qualities of a race or breed?
Do you speak English? Is this a translation error?
Edit to add-
And you present it like there’s multiple definitions. There is not. This is Merriam’s entry-
the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations’ genetic composition
The second one is for kids. The follow on context under the actual definition also makes it very clear that this was selective breeding by sterilization, closely related to white supremacy ideology.
They literally say “Word beginning with ‘eu’ and ends with ‘genics’” inside the article pimping them out.
With a sprinkling of ‘Orchid doesn’t like us to use that word’ as if ‘Nazis do not like to be called Nazis’ is a valid complaint.
Wasn’t there a movie about this? Called Gattaca?
These people are saying “we finally created the utopia of Neuromancer.” And I look at them and I go, “I don’t think you read Neuromancer."
–Cory Doctorow
Do you want Khan Noonien Singh? Because that’s how you get Khan Noonien Singh.
Eugenics is overblown, they can’t even tell the difference between a pre ganglionic fiber and a post ganglionic nerve
They can be great at darts though.
Do you want Khan Noonien Singh?
YES!
How to invoke tldr bot?
It automatically replies when it can read/summarize a site, but that isn’t always possible (maybe it has problems with some paywalls).
Is there a nonpaywall link?
Elysium IRL
Another tick box on the Star Trek timeline! There is still hope!
